…I totally didn’t expect you to be right, but at least as far as shootings go, there it is:
Black people are over-represented (18% vs 12% of the population), but I don’t know if that’s statistically significant at n=506.
Not that this is acceptable regardless what race the victims are.
Oh, hey, America, I was just checking in to see if you’d read some fucking Robert Peel ye- Oh.
I’ll check back later, all right?
Well, the percentage of unarmed blacks shot is much greater than that of unarmed whites. Somehow a white dude carrying a cellphone is seen carrying a cellphone whereas the even hinting at anything in the hand is almost always assumed to be a gun if you’re black dude.
“In you defence, you site, “fearing for your life”; even though your victim was unarmed and sitting down?”
“Well, y’know, existential dread got the better of me.”
Needs to be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon.
Not exactly the ad you want to see about coming to visit Pennsylvania Dutch Country, Lancaster.
It’s OK.
Soon the Supreme Court will encourage this sort of thing.
I didn’t say “SIMON SEZ!”
After the third or fourth time the officers said to straighten your legs and the man spread his feet and rested his elbows on his knees, the officers should have realized that the poor guy believed he was complying and was maybe not thinking clearly in a stressful situation. A new instruction should have been tried-- eg. “Your knees are still bent. You’re not in the right position if your knees are bent.” Or “Stretch your legs all the way out.” This cop is like the stereotyped American in Paris who just keeps getting louder when the waiter doesn’t speak English. Zapping someone with a taser for not understanding you is tyrannical.
But why did the sitting man have to straighten his legs in the first place, on pain of arrest/assault?
And what is straightening ones legs a test for? Certainly not sobriety.
And yet black people are much less than half of the population. And nobody has real statistics on beatings and general police harassment, but it would take wilful blindness to deny that PoC are massively overrepresented among the victims.
Yes, the rise of overt fascism is making it worse, but the difference between 2018 and 2015 is marginal.
The USA has always been based upon white supremacy and the exploitation of poverty. The cops didn’t suddenly begin beating and murdering people just as phone cameras were invented; it has ever been thus.
But while poor white people are not immune to this, it has always been poor black people who take the worst of it. It was deliberately engineered that way.
From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
I don’t think I’m going to let my kids play that game anymore.
This sort of thing is why some people snap and go on cop killing rampages. Some people just can’t handle seeing an armed gang of thugs destroy the peace and abuse the people with impunity.
Wanna make the job of being a cop safer? Stop breaking the damned law.
No, it was a test of servility. In the eyes of authority, he failed, so they punished him. Police in the US, if you are not white, are all Judge Dredd.
As someone up thread pointed out, this is illegal. But guess what? The only person who will be punished is the victim.
And you thought “Simon Says” didn’t prepare you for the real world!
“You don’t look like an airplane to me.”
(Tase. Tase.)
I was thinking I’d get tased for asking, “Biplane, y-wing, or swept wing?”
*starts beating them up and down"
Ralph from the Simpsons voice: “I’m an ornithopter!”
“De-escalation is for punks! I AM THE LAW!”
Unpacking the symbolism of the “Thin Blue Line” flag is a rabbit hole.
I went down that rabbit hole and found that it opens into a cesspool 
It’s a fascist flag.
